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Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity

Stephen Toulmin

3.93 · Rating details · 277 ratings · 25 reviews

In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and ...more

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Paperback, 235 pages

Published November 1st 1992 by University of Chicago Press (first published 1990)

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Lists with This Book

Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul

Philosophy of Science/Worldview

18 books — 10 voters

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

Knowledge

193 books — 147 voters

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May 13, 2016 Richard Newton rated it really liked it

Shelves: history-of-ideas, philosophy, thinking-about-life

I find this a difficult book to sum up. I enjoyed it. It opened my eyes to seeing philosophical, cultural and scientific theories in context -i.e. you should not interpret theories, and especially the reasons why those theories arose, because someone has found some universal truth, but as products of the context in which the theoriser was living. The book is relatively academic, but I think anyone with a moderate smattering of intellectual and philosophical knowledge will find it accessible. It ...more

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May 24, 2011 Homo rated it it was amazing

during his living days, stephen toulmin called his contemporary philosophers and academics a bunch of fart knockers that peed on themselves if sombedy axed them a question pertaining in anyway to something real, a particular concrete scenario in a certain persons life. now hes dead and contemporary philosophers are even more stupid and zizek is their king. this great book of his sets the record straight on the beginning of modernism in philosophy. its also flips the bird at modernists and later ...more

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May 24, 2014 Jonathan Norton rated it it was ok

Published in 1990, this was Toulmin's first attempt to summarise how his views on history & philosophy of science had changed over the decades, and how it impacts the wider story of science and The Enlightenment ("Return To Reason" came later on). The first half is an excellent and convincing study of Descartes in the context of France in the early 17th century. This shows that Rene was well aware of the turmoil in the world around him and that this gave the backdrop in which he found the ea Published in 1990, this was Toulmin's first attempt to summarise how his views on history & philosophy of science had changed over the decades, and how it impacts the wider story of science and The Enlightenment ("Return To Reason" came later on). The first half is an excellent and convincing study of Descartes in the context of France in the early 17th century. This shows that Rene was well aware of the turmoil in the world around him and that this gave the backdrop in which he found the earlier scepticism of Montaigne to be unacceptable. It also shows why his intellectual project would be attractive to other thinkers looking for a way to salvage or reconstruct the edifice of civilisation that seemed to be toppling in apocalyptic times.

Toulmin is less successful in the second half, when he tries to stretch these ideas very thinly as an "agenda of modernity" this is supposed to explain much of the cultural politics of the next 300 years. This gets awfully silly and at its worse it descends in to dreadful pop-Hegelianism that seems to be assuming History has a natural telos toward western liberal humanism, which is precisely the kind of de-particularised facile universalism that is "rationalism" at its worse - his ostensible target. Of course at the end of 80s all sorts of people were thinking this way, Francis Fukuyama (God help us) being the most prominent. Some of the "looking ahead" musings here got dated awfully quickly - the 90s turned out to see a revival of interest in nationalism, rather than the inexorable progress of trans-nationalism expected. And Stephen seems to be expecting Gorbachev to be around much longer than he was.

On a positive note, he had moments when he was quite aware that things are not always rosy and we might not be slouching towards Eden. He is also keen to stress that his is not concerned for any kind of constructionist trivialism of science or glib anti-rationalism - he was a serious philosopher, not a tuppence ha'penny hack like Bryan Appleyard or any of the dozens of dreary windbags with their second-hand never-read references to Kuhn and "scientism". He was a former student of Wittgenstein who made his name with the influential "anti-logic book" (as Strawson called it) "The Uses Of Arguments", which first drew attention to how real debates function in dimensions beyond simple battles between alternative sets of propositions and their formal entailments. Trouble is, he forgets his own lesson, and treats "the modern world view" as if it were precisely such a bundle of axioms, rather than anything to live by. He doesn't consider that *any* theory of physics and the universe could as well fill the "cosmopolitical" role he holds that Newtonianism was assigned to, and in any case wasn't the pre-modern Ptolemaic model an enshrining of the centrality of Earth which put everything in its proper place? Didn't that and Aristotelianism serve any conservative polemical purposes? In any case, who are the constituency that held these views? "All educated people", but that would include a large amount of clergy right up to the brink of the 20th century. It is ridiculous to suggest that any kind of cultural consensus existed in the 1920s or 30s on logical positivism or guided by the Vienna Circle; plenty of movements were pulling in other directions. Take a look at Marshall Berman's "All That Is Solid Melts In To Air" to get a much broader picture of "modernity" than Toulmin was seeing from the HPS department library.

What both writers would agree about is a scepticism about reports of a "post-modern condition" or distinctive rupture, as opposed to modernity's continued evolution. In that respect they were both correct, but with different arguments. Berman's modernity lives in the streets of New York; Toulmin remained in the abstract cloud-city of Cosmopolis, even when he desired to escape from it. But there are plenty of worthwhile ideas in here, just read the final chapters as a period piece.

...more

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Jun 13, 2016 Imen added it

Shelves: haven-t-finished-yet, read-in-2015

who i am,
Who we are,
are we humans?
or just machines need to be feed with oil?
ah no i know who i am
i am a wealthy person like limozine
i choose who rides me
oh i am hungry
i need to fill my stomack
hey girl come
feed me baby
oh yeah we are eating like humans, aren't we?
hey friend tell me about the latest top car
oh c'mon it's still limozine
shall i change it again?
it is still brilliant shiny new
wait wait
i am thirsty
can you water me baby?
oh how sweaty you are
you should not be jogging
you should not be feed ...more

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Mar 02, 2010 thad.miller rated it really liked it

Highly recommended read for those interested in this stuff. Toulmin traces back the start of Modernity and the Quest for Certainty (and stability). Contrary to the popular narrative, he finds that Modernity actually started in the 16th century with a more humanistic flavor in Erasmus, Montaigne, Shakespeare, etc. Looking at the writings of these writers and others in the 17th century, in their context (rather than in the abstract), he argues that Descartes and Newton's Quest for Certainty (which ...more

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Jan 08, 2016 Adam rated it it was amazing

Shelves: uiuc-library, philosophy, history, science, pomo, non-fiction, phil-of-science

It’s kind of annoying to identify as a postmodernist, because no one knows what that means, and if they do they think it means something else, and if they don’t they think it’s awfully complicated. It’s the word I’ve used for lack of a better for a year or two now, and I’ve developed a pretty clear idea of what I mean by it. But my definition is pretty distinct from anything I’ve been able to find written out anywhere. Most places treat it as an artistic period, following modernism in architectu It’s kind of annoying to identify as a postmodernist, because no one knows what that means, and if they do they think it means something else, and if they don’t they think it’s awfully complicated. It’s the word I’ve used for lack of a better for a year or two now, and I’ve developed a pretty clear idea of what I mean by it. But my definition is pretty distinct from anything I’ve been able to find written out anywhere. Most places treat it as an artistic period, following modernism in architecture, art, and literature. That definition is limited to me because it is hard to extrapolate artistic principles to the kind of ideas I mean (though they’re related) and because it is historically limiting. Thought it may be kind of confusing, postmodernism can be identified traced through a lot of intellectual history in Europe, though it has only really flowered in the last 100 years.

I got the sense in Discovery of Time that Toulmin shared my understanding of postmodernism, particularly in its relationship to science and its evolution over time. I picked up Cosmopolis hoping it would be Toulmin’s narrative of postmodernism, and it totally fulfilled that expectation.
As ever, postmodernism defines itself in opposition to modernism, so most of Toulmin’s task is to provide an intellectual history of modernism, contextualized in its cultural and economic milieu. This is a super postmodern pursuit, and one I haven’t seen many examples of. Toulmin has a huge knowledge of Western science and philosophy and it allows him to see not just the most notable, textbook examplars of thought in a given age, but to know the outliers and eccentrics as well. With that information in hand, he traces the dominance and suppression of certain ideas by noting the nations, classes, and institutions where certain ideas were discussed during history. This is a neat strategy because it shows how those factors influence the ideas that are kosher to broach and work on among communities that include not just isolated thinkers, but active diplomats, leaders, and socialites. It provides a clear interface between social trends and intellectual development.

Through that interface, Toulmin posits that the social legacy of the Thirty Years War, a bloody and acrimonious struggle between Catholics and Protestants, created the cultural conditions that valued the hyper-rational ideas of Modernism. The Thirty Years War ended with a shell-shocked Europe and the independence of modern nation states from the international authority of the Papacy. The creation of nation states, alongside the shift to more market-based economic communities, shifted identities from vertical feudal regions to horizontal classes. That new intellectual arrangement demanded a new worldview to support it, which was found in an analogy with the new cosmology of Newton.

The philosophical basis of Christianity always seems tenuous to me, but for thousands of people to die over a rather narrow but intractable theological dispute apparently precipitated a huge crisis in the European intellectual community. Rather than acknowledging that both sides are expressions of the same faith in slightly different contexts they for some reason (this was left essentially unexamined in the book, one of the weakest links in its argument to me) looked to first principles, a clean slate of thought that could resolve this intractable dispute.

First principles, as laid out first by Descartes and elaborated by many philosophers who found his premises enticing, involved a series of faith-based premises that far overreached the scientific knowledge available at the time. They also seem to contradict the model of science laid out by Francis Bacon. They’re centered around a particularly phrased dichotomy between rational human minds and inert, mechanistic nature that allowed scholars to feel justified in, for instance, treating human history as a series of rational choices (cf economics), reifying the political order as a metaphor from cosmology, denying the possibility of ecological history much less environmental history, and setting back the very premises of psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology by centuries.

So it seems natural that shedding these premises and embracing a contextualized view of the world, especially in focusing on the factors that shape human reason, would be a central part of the scientific method and philosophy. But the history Toulmin lays out undermines that point. Science emerged during a period obsessed with its own objectivity, the independence of its thought from the realities of its thinkers. And a ton of science got done nonetheless. That, to me, is an interesting point about the philosophy of science and I think it complicates our understanding of what science is. But regardless, science created itself under the philosophical auspices of rational modernity, and it’s not too surprising that it would look back on its history and validate those assumptions.

I still just struggle a bit to understand how this was still such an acrimonious debate in the 90’s. Perhaps all the research on motivated reasoning and the big debates about data analysis and science funding sources and objectivity that make the problems of objectivity in science so flummoxing to me now were still not well described or publicized then. But still, cmon, everything the postmodernists were saying in the science wars came straight from science itself (especially the recent postmodern offshoots like anthropology and psychology, but still). Weren’t they just reviving Bacon’s principles, trying to apply the critical lens of science to its own workings and ensure we were striving towards objectivity better than we had in the past? How could scientists really believe their work was objective and independent of social factors? Why did it take “outsiders” to break the hold of some very unscientific premises? I dunno, I’ve still got some reading to do on that.

Toulmin traces the ideas of modernism into the 20th century, when they were threatened by relativity, psychology, anthropology, and early ecology, but delayed by a last-ditch surge in hyper-rationalism sparked by the first World War (a parallel for the Thirty Years War in many ways). This narrative makes a lot of sense of some absurd extremes in philosophy and art like positivism and twelve-tone music. It also explains the burst of intellectual change in the 60s—the release of a subordinate tradition in thought that had been building up, especially in the last hundred years, but which found kindred spirits going back hundreds of years (in the Romantic movement, eg).

The narrative is quite convincing, but it can feel a bit too convincing, a bit too simple. It doesn’t feel like Toulmin tries all that hard to muster counterevidence, and ultimately this kind of intellectual history can only explain so much. I did kind of wonder how other major social upheavals between 1618 and 1914 affected the trajectory of Modernism, like the Napoleonic Wars, for instance. Put charitably, there’s a lot of mileage left on the premise Toulmin outlined, and hopefully I’ll be able to find some histories of science that follow in his mold (it has been 26 years since Cosmopolis was written, so I think that’s a reasonable expectation). ...more

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Feb 18, 2019 Marcos Amaral rated it it was amazing

Um livro que confronta a narrativa padrão de uma modernidade monocromática, instaurada pela fase científica (cartesiana) do renascimento - que Toulmin chamará, em verdade, de contra-renascença - e a diversidade de cores da pós-modernidade, responsável pela retomada dos valores humanistas de outro renascimento, o de Montaigne. A argumentação de Toulmin se assenta na ideia de que o humanismo que servirá de insumo para a contracultura dos anos 1960, inclusos aí movimentos feminista e negro, não é a ...more

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Sep 05, 2017 Pieter rated it liked it

Shelves: filosofie

What's Modernity? We like to the link the beginning of this term to people like Descartes, Liebniz and Galilei. All gave a new drive to astronomy and philosophy. But the 17th century they were living in was not an era of free speech, but of strict doctrine (Cromwell, Counterreformation,...). The 16th century was more open minded with thinkers and writers like Erasmus, Shakespeare and Montaigne.

The Thirty Year War has created a sense of urgency with Descartes and others to rethink society and to ...more

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Feb 26, 2016 Peter Hoff rated it it was amazing

Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis (1990) is one of those defining metatomes that come along from time to time. Parallels in my limited range of awareness are, for me, books like Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. They are books that can only be attempted by writers and thinkers with encyclopedic knowledge and a brilliant capacity to analyze and synthesize. They can only be read by people with sufficient background knowledge to grasp referen Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis (1990) is one of those defining metatomes that come along from time to time. Parallels in my limited range of awareness are, for me, books like Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. They are books that can only be attempted by writers and thinkers with encyclopedic knowledge and a brilliant capacity to analyze and synthesize. They can only be read by people with sufficient background knowledge to grasp references to works spanning the last 500 or so years and dozens of academic disciplines—criteria that put me only on the fringe of meeting the necessary qualifications.
Cosmopolis—brilliantly titled because it references the totality of our understanding of the physical and natural world, plus the totality of human thought, understanding, and interaction, traces Toulmin’s concept of the Modern as a phenomenon that to his thinking arose in the seventeenth century, went through several phases up through the twentieth century, and then did—or didn’t—die.
In Toulmin’s paradigm, the Renaissance was a time dominated by a Humanism that was more or less set aside by modernity, which attempted to replace Renaissance Humanism—and a lot of other things—with reason, rationality, empirical observation, and calculation. Thus for him the Renaissance was the end of the Medieval period, not the beginning of the modern. Seventeenth-century thinkers had a high level of motivation to create something new. Prior sources of certainty, most notably religion, had let them down. The utter devastation and ruin of the Thirty-Years War (1618-1648), fought in the name of which Christian denomination was the one true faith, had made it clear that a quest for certain knowledge could not rest on such a shaky and shifting foundation. Most such thinkers did not abandon their respective faiths, but they no longer based their secular philosophy on faith. Rather they (e.g., Copernicus, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, etc.) looked to empirical observation (looking at the moon through a telescope) and contextless but hopefully universal abstract ideas (“I think therefore I am”) to form the basis for new understanding that could not be challenged.
Having gone through the four hundred years during which this way of seeking truth (and dare I say “progress?”), we have lost much of our innocence about the limitless possibilities of modern thinking. As Pope put it, “God said ‘Let Newton be’ and all was light,” lasted only until Einstein and Planck showed otherwise. Bacon’s scientific revolution brought Nature to her knees and set her in service of mankind only until the one percent grabbed up all the profits and put mankind to work in service of them.
Clearly such snippets of a synopsis do little justice to Toulmin’s work. There is so much more. And when it is all over, one could have a hearty debate with this man, who like my own academic mentor Ian Watt, drew so much from his study at Cambridge with Wittgenstein. But to have that debate, one would have to be as smart as Toulmin and know as much as he did. Not many of us meet those criteria either.
As an intellectual dinosaur myself, I find that Toulmin offers me comfort even in the context of his withering deconstruction of modernism. He does it by remarrying modernism with humanism, and optimistically suggesting that what is good in both will come together in whatever is next to take us to a new and better place. And he does it by letting me choose: Have we entered what he calls the “Third Phase of Modernism,” or are we (as so many prefer to think) now in the Post-Modern period that has abandoned the “childish” things that we valued when we were merely modern.
The dinosaur in me wants to go with the first option. I am too old to give up my concept of the modern and what I like about it. Only time will tell. Galileo, Descartes and Newton had absolutely no idea what would eventually come out of what they started, and neither do we now.

...more

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Jan 21, 2016 Andrew rated it really liked it

Cool analysis of something I thought of primarily in its early twentieth-century configuration (in art and literature). I loved how he explicated on the significance of academic *fields* on large-scale developments of worldview, and the way society-at-large has been structured in the modern period (1650-1950) to reflect how the intellectual establishment weighed certain academic fields above others.

I was kind of annoyed by the repetitiveness of his binary between the 'conceptual rationalist uni Cool analysis of something I thought of primarily in its early twentieth-century configuration (in art and literature). I loved how he explicated on the significance of academic *fields* on large-scale developments of worldview, and the way society-at-large has been structured in the modern period (1650-1950) to reflect how the intellectual establishment weighed certain academic fields above others.

I was kind of annoyed by the repetitiveness of his binary between the 'conceptual rationalist universal' cosmopolitical dream of Newton/Descartes and the 'practical local humanism' of Montaigne/Shakespeare/Renaissance; and how the former camp was quintessentially 'modern,' while 'postmodernism' involves turning toward practicality and pluralism and grassroots issues. I don't disagree with this, but I was waiting for him to qualify that it might be possible to support a form of rigorous systematicity *without* making claims to universal certainty. However, he never illuminated this possibility.

More importantly, I wish he could have gone into classifying Descartes' method differently, instead of referring to it by its agenda alone. If the modernist cosmopolitical dream is proven to be just that - a dream - I want to THINK of it as something other than timeless and universal, but Toulmin only periodically gives us the opportunity to do so. More often, he exhaustively maintains the terminology surrounding his binary. I want to situate Cartesian thought within a different scheme. Yes, this mode of thought privileged physics and Euclidean geometry as 'master fields,' and yes, this refuses to account for human experience in the way we'd want the sciences to be going forward, but toulmin never actually deconstructs the notion that abstract concepts and immovable theories can be anything other than pretensions toward mastery. He undercuts the Cartesian half of his binary with a somewhat dismissive flick, but this dismissiveness strikes me as a move made in petulance. I'm all for frolicking in the fields of diversity and plurality, but I wish he could have advocated for these values by actually demystifying the cosmopolitical tower -calling it for what it is as a deeply human enterprise, and as an idiosyncratic stake in identity - instead of keeping it up in the clouds as a divine illusion. ...more

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Mar 06, 2015 Frankie Della Torre rated it really liked it

Shelves: anthropology, history, postmodernism

This is what we might today call a post-modern critique of the Enlightenment, with particular reference to Renaissance humanism. Toulmin wants to take the best aspects of modernity and counteract them with a return to the Renaissance humanism of thinkers like Michel de Montaigne. What we need is a modernity that's been revised by the earlier strand of humanism which really set the stage for modernity itself; all of this entails a focus on the local, oral, particular, and timely, over against the ...more

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Sep 17, 2011 John rated it it was ok

Not a book to recommend to casual readers OR historians. This is a book of philosophy, so if you really want to spend a lot of time considering subtle changes in European philosophy over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this may be your book, otherwise, steer clear. I'm also not sure what "hidden agenda" of modernity means, even after reading the book. I don't remember a hidden agenda. This makes this book sound decidedly more intriguing then it actually is. The book should just be title ...more

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May 31, 2007 Leah rated it it was amazing

this is no easy book to read. i remember complaining about it almost non-stop. even though our professors were kind enough to space it out among other more readable books, that just meant "oh no, now we have to read cosmopolis again." yet, in the end, perhaps one of the most important books of my college career in terms of shaping my worldview.

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Oct 09, 2017 Sagely rated it really liked it

I read Toulmin's Cosmopolis for a DMin course. I heartily enjoyed the story Toulmin weaves. Good reading.

Below find my "working outline" of Toulmin's text.

Preface/Prologue
Toulmin frames Cosmopolis as a “change of mind” (ix). More specifically, Cosmopolis
rehistoricizes Modernity, challenging “the picture our teachers gave us” of Modernity’s auto- genetic appearance in the 17th century as a pure intellectual movement. In its place Toulmin narrates in chs 1-3 what he calls a “realistic picture of ...more

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Feb 09, 2019 Doug rated it really liked it

Helps us to understand why and how we have come to think as we do in the West in the early 21st century. Posits the need for transnational communities which aid each other in local contexts. I see this to be the mission of the Lord's body.

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Apr 05, 2014 Mu-tien Chiou rated it it was amazing

Shelves: cultural-studies

In short, this study supports the heartfelt [Christian] humanism (of Erasmus and de Montaigne) in the 16th century as a cure to the wrongheaded modernity project between 17th and 20th century that was based on Descartes, Bacon, and Newton.

The are two interesting things to point out though
1) Machiavelli, who inspired Descartes and Bacon is apparently also a 16th century figure. So the author's way of giving a diachronic account of Western cultural ethos after certain selective thinkers' name app ...more

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Aug 06, 2011 Matthew rated it it was amazing

A cogent and insightful archeology of the concept and historical epoch known as Modernity. Putting historical events and persons in context that helps explore and examine not just the what but the why of the last three hundred years, Toulmin asks questions such as Why was the urge for a universal, systematic, rational picture of the world so appealing to people in the early 18th century? What happened in the 17th century to set the stage for the rapid conquest of these ideas? What has changed th ...more

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Nov 19, 2015 John Henry rated it liked it

Shelves: my-library

I agree with Toulmin’s view that "students get only part of their education from formal classwork. The rest comes from the friendships and relationships they form. If they live in a community where they're in touch with faculty, then their college experience is going to be that much richer." "Students who go to class are introduced to a lot of intellectual techniques in one particular discipline or another," he says. "What they can learn by living in a community is that a lot of these techniques ...more

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Aug 14, 2012 Angie Boyter rated it liked it

Some interesting ideas but uneven.
It's the kind of book that I wish had been a lecture or discussion instead so that I could say things like, "Well, what did you mean by this?" or "This seems inconsistent with that". It makes me uncertain if the flaw is in me or him. He doesn't bring in the concept of cosmopolis often enough, for one thing, but maybe he does and I just don't see it.
The Sunday Philosophers will be discussing it, so I'll get other people's take on it soon.

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Sep 29, 2009 Serena rated it really liked it

Very approachable and an interesting theory about the certainty of Descartes and Newton and the desire for decontextualized science and philosophy for modernity. Toulmin basically theorizes that the religious wars of the 17th century rejected the humanism of the Renaissance and we only got it back during the Civil Rights movement.

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Mar 16, 2010 Evan Fraser rated it it was amazing

This is an exceptional book that shows how the Enlightenment was a product of the deeply unsettled political, economic and environmental conditions in the 17th century. While extremely scholarly, it is also very readable and has profound implications for today.

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Jan 18, 2011 Clint rated it really liked it

Shelves: philosophy

An excellent critique of the accepted explanation for the Scientific Revolution and the philosophical and political movements that it spawned.

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Jul 07, 2012 Dan rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, philosophy

Review forthcoming

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Nov 21, 2009 Jonathan added it

Shelves: literary, criticism, history

None

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Jul 27, 2012 Brent Ranalli rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-studies, 17th-century

An essential book for one who wants to get his/her intellectual bearings in today's world.

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Dec 17, 2011

Susan Snyder rated it it was amazing
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